Subject/USFW Retiree: Lowry, Gerry
April 14, 2005
Interviewed by: Dorothe Norton
D. Norton:
Well Jerry, thanks for the good directions you gave because I almost did it without anymore but the one phone call. So now we'll just get busy and do the interview. First of all, I want to know where and when you were born.
Gerry Lowry:
In Eau Claire, Wisconsin at Luther Hospital on August 15, 1935.
D. Norton:
Okay, you're a young guy. What were your parent's names?
Gerry Lowry:
Oliver Walker Lowery, mom Ginny Lucille.
D. Norton:
What were their educations and their jobs?
Gerry Lowry:
My father was a high school graduate, one of the few in his family, and my mother attended a teacher's normal college in Eau Claire.
D. Norton:
Did she teach school then?
Gerry Lowry:
Never.
D. Norton:
Never. Okay, and so where did you spend your early years then, all in....
Gerry Lowry:
Let me tell you another thing, my father worked as a manager for the U.S. Rubber Company at Eau Claire. He managed a team of women who made bicycle tires.
D. Norton:
Oh, wow!
Gerry Lowry:
He contracted probably a variation of the British flu or some severe respiratory illness when he was 29 years old, and within a couple of years he had severe cardiopulmonay side effects that made him an invalid the rest of his life.
D. Norton:
Oh, that's sad.
Gerry Lowry:
He lived until he was 42 years old. After that occurred, we moved onto a 20-acre farm between Eau Claire and Colfax, Wisconsin, and that's where I spent the first nine years of my life, in a very rural environment. My dad was in and out of hospitals, bed-ridden most of the time at home, not very mobile. My mom then would work off and on at jobs in Eau Claire, and towards the end she worked at the ammunitions plant in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. My dad died in 1944, and we moved to Eau Claire Wisconsin, I was in about the fourth grade, I think, at the time. I went to school there for about a year, and then she remarried and we moved to Altoona, Wisconsin, and I was there until a freshman in high school. The person she married had been a cook in the Army during World War II, and he always wanted a restaurant; he wanted to be a chef, so he bought a restaurant in New Auburn, Wisconsin, which is where Sandy is from. So that's how we got to New Auburn, and so I spent three years then in high school in New Auburn, and graduated in 1953.
D. Norton:
That's called New Auburn High School?
Gerry Lowry:
Yes, New Auburn High School. After that I went to college for a few months, and then dropped out of college and joined the Air Force in 1954, and did it in order to get the GI Bill, quite frankly, because it was clear to me that going to school and being hungry were not compatible!
D. Norton:
Okay. So while you were in the Air Force, where were you based?
Gerry Lowry:
Well first, of course, like everyone else, I went to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, and then from there Chanute Field and to Meteorology school in Illinois. I was there for several months and then went from there to Colorado Springs to the Air Force Base as a weather observer and spent a few months there. I then went from there to Anchorage, Alaska for what was then considered to be a mandatory overseas assignment. I spent a few weeks there and then was assigned to King Salmon, Alaska, which was a remote weather station at the base of the Alaska Peninsula. I was there a few months and then came back to Anchorage for a few weeks, got reassigned to Shemya, Alaska, which is at the very end of the Aleutian chain, or almost to the end, within about 30-40 miles of Attu, which is the last island in the chain. I and one other weatherman set up a weather station on Shemya, which turned out later to be a base where they had C-119s that were catching photographic capsules that were being ejected from the first satellites that were sent around the world to take pictures, and the C-119s would fly out with about 1000-foot long metal or wire hooks to catch these parachutes as they got dropped in out of the satellites. So that went on for a few months, and then Northwest Airlines made some deal with the government where they took over the island and used it as an emergency stop from between Anchorage and Japan, and most or all of the military personnel then left the island. I have no idea, but I think at about that time other technology came along to solve the problem on retrieving photographic material from the satellites. We were on Shemya for about six months; after that I went back to Anchorage and spent a week or two and then went up to Fairbanks to Eielson Air Force Base for another short period of time, and then was assigned to Galena, Alaska for the remainder of my tour duty in Alaska. Galena was another weather observation station along the Yukon River, between Nome and Fairbanks. I stayed there for the remainder of that; I was probably there for a number of months, I don't remember exactly how many, and then went from there and was reassigned back in the U.S. to Great Falls to Malmstrom Air Force Base, and was there for a number of months. I then was selected to go to the National Air Force Weather Center at Suitland, Maryland, and was assigned there; it was near Andrews Air Force Base, but Suitland was the weather center away from the base. Periodically, we would go down onto the Washington Mall when the Soviet Union had nuclear tests. We would go down and plot the weather and the drift of nuclear fallout material around the globe until that event ended. Also, while I was there I went to an exercise for a week where we went to a mountain, an underground mountain, to test what would happen in the event of an attack on the U.S., which was kind of interesting because we went inside a mountain and had all of our weather apparatus there and were involved in that exercise. I was discharged from the Air Force in November of 1957 at Andrews Air Force Base, and I was discharged a couple of months early in order to start college in January of 1958.
I started at what was called Wisconsin State College at that time, now it's considered The University at Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I attended school there for a year and a half in just kind of a pre-Science curriculum, and at the end of that time, which would have been the summer of 1959, I applied and was accepted in geology at Montana University at Missoula. I went there for one semester and decided that I would prefer to be in conservation, so I transferred to the University of Minnesota at St. Paul. I was perhaps influenced because my girlfriend, now my wife Sandra, was from New Auburn, Wisconsin, and so I came back to the University of Minnesota and started there in January of 1960, and graduated from there in March of 1962. At the time I graduated, I applied for jobs, and I saw one application for a fellowship that paid as much as a job with the Fish and Wildlife Service. About the same time, I got a letter from Gulf Breeze, Florida, and the Fish and Wildlife Marine Research arm at that time offering me, I think it was, a GS-5 job probably, to start as a biologist there. I'm not of the grade level. I also, at about the same time, got a letter from Oregon State saying that I was ordered a fellowship in Fisheries that would pay the same as the job at Fish and Wildlife Service, plus the fact that I could get a Masters degree in Fisheries, and so I naturally accepted the fellowship at Oregon, and started there in the summer of 1962.
Sandra and I were located on a 50,000-acre Georgia-Pacific plantation near Toledo, Oregon, studying cutthroat trout migration and reproduction in food, and did a two year study on cutthroat trout and the impacts, a pre-logging baseline study that was eventually to study the impact of three different kinds of logging. So, basically, what we did was we had three small streams, and we took population estimates and did food studies on cutthroat trout over a two year period, and then some years after I left, Georgia-Pacific came in and did clear cut and two other different kinds of logging, and the effects of that were studied over a period of many, many years under Major Professor, Don Chapman, and later Jim Hall, and the results were eventually published that were used in the west coast as guidance for environmental regulations to minimize the impact of logging. When I finished there, and I got a Masters degree in Fisheries Research in March of 1964, I was selected for a fisheries research job in Wisconsin Conservation Department, now their Department of Natural Resources at Seven Springs Hatchery near Madison, Wisconsin.
We went there and I worked on warm water fish research at Cox Hollow Impoundment west of Madison, and did that for several months; well actually, we lived in a couple of different places there, so it probably would be more like a year or so. Then I got more interested in trout research, so it shifted from warm water research to trout research, and transferred to Westfield, to Lawrence Creek Research Station, and which was a long-term study of brook trout production and life history and the impacts of different kinds of stream improvement techniques. While I was there, I got acquainted with the people at Stevens Point at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, and they offered me a job teaching biology. At the same time, I also applied for a job with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service for a field biologist in northern Wisconsin. I did teach for a part of a semester at Stevens Point, but got an opportunity to take the field biologist job for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. So, beginning in about the very late fall of 1965, I started working for the Federal Government as a field biologist for northern Wisconsin.
My territory was basically north of a line from Eau Claire to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and traveled with a canoe on top of a government car, and did a lot work with landowners, fish ponds, developing plans for the enhancement of deer, grouse, and other wildlife on private lands in that area. One of the most interesting things that I did during that period of time was, because while in the Soil Conservation Service, there were only two biologists in the state of Wisconsin, and some of the activities of a biologist went over into the area of recreation specialist, and I gradually became a recreation specialist and designing campgrounds. I designed a campground at Washburn, Wisconsin on Lake Superior for example, and some others ones, and did analysis of recreational potential and also some economic analysis of whether things were feasible or not. But probably the most fun thing that I did during that period of time was to get involved in writing canoe trail guides for Wisconsin. I wrote the canoe trail guides for northwest Wisconsin and north central Wisconsin, and also northeastern Wisconsin. The northwest and north central ones were published by independent canoe trail organizations. These were all done under the Food and Agricultural Act of 1964, which authorized something called Research Conservation and Development Projects; under the auspices of those programs, the work was done by the Soil Conservation Service, taking air photos and making maps of the rivers, and then I would write the narratives. In the course of doing that, it became necessary, of course, to travel many of the rivers with a canoe so that I had some first- hand knowledge. But the one for northeastern Wisconsin, the canoe trail organization that was there decided to cut a deal with Howard Mead of Wisconsin Tales and Trails, and so that one was published as a for profit venture by Wisconsin Tales and Trails. I found it amusing in an example of human nature that when Howard Mead got ahold of a narrative, he went through it and edited lightly and then put himself down as the author, which, as a philosopher says, "You know, these are humans, we shouldn't expect too much." This applies to a lot of things.
But anyway, after that I became more interested in management and, of course, we were having children at the time and, as often is the case, people who work for organizations, both private and public, once they get to be thirty and realize that there is something called money and consequences that flow from it and have children, we decided that it might be a good idea to have a higher paying job, so I got involved in management of the Resource Conservation and Development Project as project coordinator and did that for a couple of years, and a couple of years later was selected by the Soil Conservation Service for their Executive Development Program at one of six universities, and I was sent to Syracuse University for a year to get a Masters degree in Public Administration. It was a delightful year, both I and Sandy went to school at that time, we had four kids, we lived in student housing, we saw no one from our agency for a year, they paid our full salary and all of the costs of going to school as well as relocation allowances. It was just a wonderful time, and we enjoyed Syracuse. However, it was sort of like The Devil and Daniel Webster; at the end of that time they informed me we were going to go to Washington. We weren't real happy about it because we had been living in Spooner, Wisconsin. I always like to think it was like looking through the telescope from one end and then somebody grabbing it and turning it around and saying, "Here, look through the other end for awhile," because it was a completely different situation, and we weren't really thrilled about it, but naturally we went there because in order to go to school, I had to sign an agreement that I would work anywhere that they wanted me to for at least two years.
So, we went down there, and as it turned out, it was really a most interesting and enjoyable assignment except for the commuting. Like a lot of families with children, we lived out in Fairfax, Virginia in a place called Greenbrier, but it was about an hour and fifteen minutes commute to work, and it was always very heavy traffic and the last ten miles was pretty much bumper to bumper, so the commuting was no fun. But, I really did find that the best and brightest people in the agency with at that time, the Soil Conservation Service, now called the Natural Resource Conservation Service, had a lot of very bright and interesting people in Washington. When I got there it was in 1975. I was there for a little over two years, and it was at the height of the environmental movement, so it was a fun time for an environmentalist and conservationist to be there because you had the opportunity to write regulations and speeches for people that could actually influence the environmental activities of the agency and, to some extent, the public and politicians nationwide. So, it was a fun period of time. At the end of the two years I decided that I really kind of wanted to get out of Washington, so I applied for a job as the Midwest Regional Biologist at Lincoln, Nebraska for the Soil Conservation Service. I was selected for it, and in late 1977 we moved to Lincoln, Nebraska and I assumed my duties at the regional office as Midwest Regional Biologist.
I found that the job for the regional offices, quite frankly, in Soil Conservation Service by that time was becoming a little bit redundant. I felt like it was a fun job, a great place to live and, in fact, the people in Nebraska were the most friendly people we have ever encountered, but I found the job just kind of boring. Also, at that time we had moved over twenty times and, of course, with school and jobs and everything. So Sandy and I decided we would really like to get somewhere and stay, and I would have had to have had probably three more transfers in the Soil Conservation Service before I could have got a conservations job and stay in one place, and it wouldn't necessarily have been where I wanted to be, and I wanted to be in Minneapolis, and I wanted the kids not to have to move, the oldest one was going to be a junior in high school. So we started applying for jobs with Fish and Wildlife Service in Minneapolis. I finally got selected for one, I had to take a two grade cut to get there, but I was sick of transferring and I wanted the kids to be in one spot.
That is how we came to the Fish and Wildlife Service in Minneapolis, as an environmental specialist for the Refuge System at the regional office in Minneapolis. That was in 1978, and within a couple of years, I enjoyed that job, but within a couple of years, Ray St. Ores, who was the Assistant Regional Director for Environment, that wasn't the name at that time, retired. I applied for his job; I was encouraged to apply for it by other people at the regional office, and was selected for it, and that was the job that I spent for the next ten years, even though its name got changed and the function got changed to some degree, and so I was the Assistant Regional Director for, what ended up when I retired, the ARD for Environment, Regional Office, Minneapolis. I retired in 1990, at the age of 55. That basically was the moment I became eligible!
My general philosophy about jobs is that it's nice if you could be at a job for three years. The first year, if it's a challenging job, you're kind of bewildered, the second year you get it down pat, and the third year you make some contributions. After that, it tends to become kind of pro forma and not too exciting. I considered the ten years that I spent at that job as a fun job with a lot of interesting people, but not very exciting. So when it became possible for me to retire at 55, I accepted the opportunity and left the Fish and Wildlife Service.
In the meantime, we were living in Hudson, Wisconsin, which is just across the river, and in the meantime, well beginning actually in Nebraska, my wife Sandy had gotten a real estate license in Nebraska, but before she had a chance to do much with it, we moved to Wisconsin and I began working at Fish and Wildlife Service. She then started working as a real estate broker, first a small company and then Century 21, and then after about six years or so of that, she decided that she wanted to work by herself, and formed Lowery Real Estate in Hudson, Wisconsin starting in 1988. When I retired from Fish and Wildlife Service in 1990, I had previously gotten a brokers license so that she and I could talk about the business she was in too, she wasn't ready to retire, and so I worked with her and basically helped her in the management and the business execution side of the real estate business until about 1997. At which time we sold our property, and at that time I had been seven years into retirement, and we sold our property in Hudson and moved to a lake cabin on Loon Lake, about forty miles north of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We had built the cabin by hand, starting in about 1985; it was sort of a weekend hobby where we would kind of de-stress ourselves from our jobs. We would come down and put up a row of logs, and slowly, over a period of a couple of years, we built the cabin, and it has now become our home. So, I guess at this point I'll ask, "Dorothe, what else are you interested in?
D. Norton:
Well, you didn't need any training when you came to us because you already had all of this other experience, but did you ever work with any animals or anything?
Gerry Lowry:
When you say animals, you mean...?
D. Norton:
Any of them, wildcats....?
Gerry Lowry:
No, basically my degree at the University of Minnesota was in fisheries, well it was Fish and Wildlife Management is the degree that you get from University of Minnesota. It's necessarily kind of general, but it had an emphasis in fisheries and the Masters degree at Oregon was Fisheries Research. When I worked as a field biologist for the Soil Conservation Service, we worked with fish and wildlife for private landowners in northern Wisconsin, but when you do that you're developing management plans, it's not hands on work with live animals or research with them. The only actual work with animals I did was the research work at Oregon State University with fish, and then later with fish research and trout research, and warm water fish with the State of Wisconsin, where you're actually netting fish, tagging them, weighing them, releasing them, recapturing them, and estimating them. The emphasis in my career was in fisheries in terms of working with animals hands on.
D. Norton:
Were there any major issues that you were involved with that you had to deal with, or were they all major issues?
Gerry Lowry:
Well, that's an interesting question. I guess I don't think of it that way. You know, you go to work, you do your job, and whatever comes, you do the best you can, whether it's major or minor.
D. Norton:
Okay.
Gerry Lowry:
I would say nothing really stands out.
D. Norton:
So you spent all of your career then at the Minneapolis Regional Office?
Gerry Lowry:
In the Fish and Wildlife Service, yes.
D. Norton:
Who were your supervisors?
Gerry Lowry:
My first supervisor was... who was the gentleman that lost his son in the canoe? I forget his name, he was a real nice fellow. You probably know him.
D. Norton:
He lost his son?
Gerry Lowry:
His son died on the Cattle River I think, in a canoe accident.
D. Norton:
I can't remember, I vaguely remember.
Gerry Lowry:
He would have been...
D. Norton:
The regional director?
Gerry Lowry:
No, when first I went there I worked for Refuges, like they had technical specialists at the regional office, and (unclear) was the supervisor of this guy.
D. Norton:
Okay, okay, John Eadie?
Gerry Lowry:
No, Eadie was a later ARD.
D. Norton:
Okay, Harold {Benson}.
Gerry Lowry:
Harold was an ARD too for refuges; this was a younger guy who worked for them, next level down.
D. Norton:
I can't remember.
Gerry Lowry:
I'm sorry, I can't think of his name, but.
D. Norton:
I never worked in Refuges, so it's just.... Okay, then after he was...?
Gerry Lowry:
Well, when I got the job for ARD for Environment I think Gritman probably, no he wasn't the.... When I first got the job, there was a fellow there that was the Deputy Regional Director, and he was retiring within just a few months. As I recall, the Regional Director’s job was vacant at that time, and then Nelson got the job and came in, and then Gritman came in as Deputy. Before Gritman, there was a fellow that actually selected me for the job, who would have been the Deputy, and this would have been 1980, approximately. Gritman came from Denver as I recall.
D. Norton:
Right, because they.... Okay, but when you retired, who was your supervisor?
Gerry Lowry:
Well, let me say this. I worked for four conservation agencies, two state and two federal, and then the two federal agencies, the Soil Conservation Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. I worked in, you could call it middle management, so I got a good exposure to the management systems in the two agencies, and it was a fascinating contrast. The Soil Conservation Service was established by a fellow named Hugh Hammond Bennett at the height of the Depression. It was established as the result of the dust bowl and pressing and obvious conservation problems, and it was established under the auspices of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who brought a bunch of very gifted, sophisticated, well-trained people in the government at that time and, as a result, the Soil Conservation Service was blessed with a very sophisticated, professional, simple management system that was basically line and staff, with a director in Washington and state directors. It was organized at the national office, six regional offices, and it was set up then along mostly state lines below that, which made it very easy for it to coordinate with states, and it had very clean and simple management structure, very sophisticated, very professional. When I came to Fish and Wildlife Service, I was somewhat chagrined and shocked to discover that this was an agency whose management system apparently had been cobbled together over long periods of time. It was a much older agency, and it had functions added and subtracted to it over the years, and it was cursed with a management system that combined line supervision with program management. In effect, always you had two supervisors, you had the people who gave you the money, the program management system, and you had the people that were your direct supervisors, and these are different people. So, you were always questioning, "Now which master should I be trying to serve most?" The one that gives you the money or the one that does your day-to-day supervision or month-to-month as it may be, and that does your performance reviews, and is going to be responsible for what you can do and can't do in the future in the agency? So, at any given moment, you might be more responsive to one, the other, neither, or both! Also, additionally, the tradition of management in the Fish and Wildlife Service is relatively unprofessional, kind of chaotic. I likened it to almost like a cowboy management atmosphere. For example, I had a deputy regional director that actually told me one time, this was relatively a young deputy regional director, and he said to me, "Here I am, the deputy regional director, and I've never had a single management training course!" This was a quotation, and this gentleman violated almost the most simplest and basic rules of management. One that always stuck in my mind was, you praise people publically and you reprimand them privately, and he would routinely... this is the smallest example of the egregious management conduct and so.... So, I found coming from the Soil Conservation Service, that had such a fortunate, and it really was largely a fortunate accident in a sense, because it was formed intact at a time with people that set up really an effective and simple and good, and had a long and professional management culture. Coming to Fish and Wildlife Service, it was a chaotic management culture, and cursed with this different system of financial and line authority. So when you asked me who my supervisor was, it brings up the interesting question, supervisor for what? Money or performance reviews? But, generally speaking, as the assistant regional director in the Fish and Wildlife Service, in theory, your supervisor is the regional director from the practical day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month standpoint. The regional directors that we had pretty much delegated the management supervision to the deputy regional director, who, for much of the time that I was ARD for Environment at Minneapolis, was a fellow named James Gritman, and then later on it was a fellow named Marvin Moriarty.
D. Norton:
James Gritman was probably the regional director when you retired?
Gerry Lowry:
Yes, um hmm.
D. Norton:
Well, we're getting kind of close here. You're doing a wonderful job, thank you. What was the high point in your career with Fish and Wildlife?
Gerry Lowry:
In conclusion, just let me say this, as long as we've done this interview, I feel like probably that I'm probably one of the relatively few service employees that worked in management, that had experience at comparable management levels in another federal agency; in my case it was Soil Conservation Service, now the Natural Resource Conservation Service, and I feel obliged, and to an extent, that it might be useful to comment on the distinct differences between these two agencies. The Soil Conservation Service was started in 1935 under the aegis of very highly educated and sophisticated people that came in with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the New Deal, and he was fortunate to bring a lot of these people into the government. As a result, the agency sprang into life fully formed with relatively few changes after that, and it had a management structure that was very efficient. There was a director at Washington, regional offices that were mainly for technical support, they were not in the line as such, and then a state director pretty much in every state; a few of the smaller states were combined. It was a very simple line and staff, both your program authority, your funding, and also your supervision was in this single line, and it developed a very strong tradition of competent, professional, sophisticated management, and also fairly early on, developed a pattern of sending perspective executive people from its ranks to half a dozen of the major management schools in the United States including Michigan, Syracuse, Harvard, Yale, and perhaps a couple more over the years. Mainly, as the years went by, drew its state directors and upper managers and Washington staff from graduates of that program. I spent twelve years in that agency, two years in the Washington office and a little over a year in the regional office, and got exposed to a lot of the management structures and how it operated. I kind of assumed when I came to Fish and Wildlife Service, without looking into it, that it would also have a very, if not exactly similar, at least a very good management culture. So I was really kind of surprised when I got to Fish and Wildlife Service and found the agency, and there's some justification for it because historically, the Fish and Wildlife Service started a long time ago and was assembled over the longer period of time; some of its functions were brought together, and somehow or other it ended up with, what I consider, a very chaotic management style. The line authority was separate from the program authority at the time that I was working with it. You got your money from one set of folks leading up to Washington, and your supervision and performance reviews and, in theory, how good of a job you're doing and where you might go next in terms of your career came from another one. In my case, management came out of the assistant director in Washington for Environment, and that person decided how much money we got. The performance and supervision was with, in theory, the regional director, but in practice it was delegated to the deputy regional director, and he was the one that did the performance reviews. As a result, at any given moment, you might be trying to please the money guy or the person that did your performance review. You might think of it as at any given moment that you might be trying most to do the best job you could for either one, the other, neither, or both. Compounding it, the people that tended to gravitate to a higher management in the Fish and Wildlife Service seemed to be a totally different kind of person; they tended to be flamboyant and given to grand gestures rather than the quiet, contemplative manager who looking a long time ahead, tended to react more to the issues in the moment. In terms of management structure, frankly, I think that the Fish and Wildlife Service would be better served if it got rid of, maybe it already has, I have been retired for almost half a career, but if it simplified its management structure so that it was simple line and staff, and that the regional offices had relatively little to say and they were mainly just technical support, and regional offices were reduced to say to a couple, one in the west that served Alaska and the western part of the U.S., one in the east that served the eastern part, and that the management authority and the money flowed directly from Washington to people, preferably organized along state lines or a few group of states if necessary. At that field level, instead of having people that were in ecological service offices and you have refuge offices and fisheries, if you had one manager that was in charge of all three of these. I realize that the service (unclear) management system there was somewhat an aborted attempt to do that, but it was never fully implemented. If anything, there is a lesson: if you're going to do something, you really do it and carry it out and not just half way because that's part and parcel of the problem. I do not want to leave this though with the idea that the Fish and Wildlife does not have a lot of good people, because it had when I worked with it. All sorts of loyal, good people doing the best they can, but the management system was, frankly, a burden in many cases, that was unnecessary and counterproductive. So, I guess, Dorothe, unless there is something else, let's go to lunch.
D. Norton:
Thank you very much. Thanks for the time, Jerry.
Gerry Lowry:
You bet. I would like to finish with a book recommendation: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, absolutely a splendid book, you simply have got to read it, everybody!
D. Norton:
Thank you.
Key Words: Fellowship in Fisheries, cutthroat trout study and the impacts of pre-logging baseline study, Major Professor, Don Chapman, Jim Hall, Masters Degree in Fisheries Research, Wisconsin Conservation Department, Department of Natural Resources, Seven Springs Hatchery near Madison, Wisconsin, Cox Hollow Impoundment, warm water research, trout research, Lawrence Creek Research Station, brook trout production, Stevens Point, University of Wisconsin, U.S. Soil Conservation Service, field biologist, recreation specialist and designing campgrounds, writing canoe trail guides for the state of Wisconsin, Food and Agricultural Act of 1964, Research Conservation and Development Projects, Howard Mead of Wisconsin Tales and Trails, Executive Development Program, Syracuse University, Masters degree in Public Administration, environmental movement, environmentalist, conservationist, Midwest Regional Biologist at Lincoln, Nebraska, environmental specialist for the Refuge System at the regional office in Minneapolis, Ray St. Ores, Assistant Regional Director for Environment, ARD for Environment, Regional Office, Minneapolis, Fish and Wildlife Management degree, University of Minnesota, John Eadie, James Gritman, Hugh Hammond Bennett, Marvin Moriarty,

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

Subject/USFW Retiree: Lowry, Gerry
April 14, 2005
Interviewed by: Dorothe Norton
D. Norton:
Well Jerry, thanks for the good directions you gave because I almost did it without anymore but the one phone call. So now we'll just get busy and do the interview. First of all, I want to know where and when you were born.
Gerry Lowry:
In Eau Claire, Wisconsin at Luther Hospital on August 15, 1935.
D. Norton:
Okay, you're a young guy. What were your parent's names?
Gerry Lowry:
Oliver Walker Lowery, mom Ginny Lucille.
D. Norton:
What were their educations and their jobs?
Gerry Lowry:
My father was a high school graduate, one of the few in his family, and my mother attended a teacher's normal college in Eau Claire.
D. Norton:
Did she teach school then?
Gerry Lowry:
Never.
D. Norton:
Never. Okay, and so where did you spend your early years then, all in....
Gerry Lowry:
Let me tell you another thing, my father worked as a manager for the U.S. Rubber Company at Eau Claire. He managed a team of women who made bicycle tires.
D. Norton:
Oh, wow!
Gerry Lowry:
He contracted probably a variation of the British flu or some severe respiratory illness when he was 29 years old, and within a couple of years he had severe cardiopulmonay side effects that made him an invalid the rest of his life.
D. Norton:
Oh, that's sad.
Gerry Lowry:
He lived until he was 42 years old. After that occurred, we moved onto a 20-acre farm between Eau Claire and Colfax, Wisconsin, and that's where I spent the first nine years of my life, in a very rural environment. My dad was in and out of hospitals, bed-ridden most of the time at home, not very mobile. My mom then would work off and on at jobs in Eau Claire, and towards the end she worked at the ammunitions plant in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. My dad died in 1944, and we moved to Eau Claire Wisconsin, I was in about the fourth grade, I think, at the time. I went to school there for about a year, and then she remarried and we moved to Altoona, Wisconsin, and I was there until a freshman in high school. The person she married had been a cook in the Army during World War II, and he always wanted a restaurant; he wanted to be a chef, so he bought a restaurant in New Auburn, Wisconsin, which is where Sandy is from. So that's how we got to New Auburn, and so I spent three years then in high school in New Auburn, and graduated in 1953.
D. Norton:
That's called New Auburn High School?
Gerry Lowry:
Yes, New Auburn High School. After that I went to college for a few months, and then dropped out of college and joined the Air Force in 1954, and did it in order to get the GI Bill, quite frankly, because it was clear to me that going to school and being hungry were not compatible!
D. Norton:
Okay. So while you were in the Air Force, where were you based?
Gerry Lowry:
Well first, of course, like everyone else, I went to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, and then from there Chanute Field and to Meteorology school in Illinois. I was there for several months and then went from there to Colorado Springs to the Air Force Base as a weather observer and spent a few months there. I then went from there to Anchorage, Alaska for what was then considered to be a mandatory overseas assignment. I spent a few weeks there and then was assigned to King Salmon, Alaska, which was a remote weather station at the base of the Alaska Peninsula. I was there a few months and then came back to Anchorage for a few weeks, got reassigned to Shemya, Alaska, which is at the very end of the Aleutian chain, or almost to the end, within about 30-40 miles of Attu, which is the last island in the chain. I and one other weatherman set up a weather station on Shemya, which turned out later to be a base where they had C-119s that were catching photographic capsules that were being ejected from the first satellites that were sent around the world to take pictures, and the C-119s would fly out with about 1000-foot long metal or wire hooks to catch these parachutes as they got dropped in out of the satellites. So that went on for a few months, and then Northwest Airlines made some deal with the government where they took over the island and used it as an emergency stop from between Anchorage and Japan, and most or all of the military personnel then left the island. I have no idea, but I think at about that time other technology came along to solve the problem on retrieving photographic material from the satellites. We were on Shemya for about six months; after that I went back to Anchorage and spent a week or two and then went up to Fairbanks to Eielson Air Force Base for another short period of time, and then was assigned to Galena, Alaska for the remainder of my tour duty in Alaska. Galena was another weather observation station along the Yukon River, between Nome and Fairbanks. I stayed there for the remainder of that; I was probably there for a number of months, I don't remember exactly how many, and then went from there and was reassigned back in the U.S. to Great Falls to Malmstrom Air Force Base, and was there for a number of months. I then was selected to go to the National Air Force Weather Center at Suitland, Maryland, and was assigned there; it was near Andrews Air Force Base, but Suitland was the weather center away from the base. Periodically, we would go down onto the Washington Mall when the Soviet Union had nuclear tests. We would go down and plot the weather and the drift of nuclear fallout material around the globe until that event ended. Also, while I was there I went to an exercise for a week where we went to a mountain, an underground mountain, to test what would happen in the event of an attack on the U.S., which was kind of interesting because we went inside a mountain and had all of our weather apparatus there and were involved in that exercise. I was discharged from the Air Force in November of 1957 at Andrews Air Force Base, and I was discharged a couple of months early in order to start college in January of 1958.
I started at what was called Wisconsin State College at that time, now it's considered The University at Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I attended school there for a year and a half in just kind of a pre-Science curriculum, and at the end of that time, which would have been the summer of 1959, I applied and was accepted in geology at Montana University at Missoula. I went there for one semester and decided that I would prefer to be in conservation, so I transferred to the University of Minnesota at St. Paul. I was perhaps influenced because my girlfriend, now my wife Sandra, was from New Auburn, Wisconsin, and so I came back to the University of Minnesota and started there in January of 1960, and graduated from there in March of 1962. At the time I graduated, I applied for jobs, and I saw one application for a fellowship that paid as much as a job with the Fish and Wildlife Service. About the same time, I got a letter from Gulf Breeze, Florida, and the Fish and Wildlife Marine Research arm at that time offering me, I think it was, a GS-5 job probably, to start as a biologist there. I'm not of the grade level. I also, at about the same time, got a letter from Oregon State saying that I was ordered a fellowship in Fisheries that would pay the same as the job at Fish and Wildlife Service, plus the fact that I could get a Masters degree in Fisheries, and so I naturally accepted the fellowship at Oregon, and started there in the summer of 1962.
Sandra and I were located on a 50,000-acre Georgia-Pacific plantation near Toledo, Oregon, studying cutthroat trout migration and reproduction in food, and did a two year study on cutthroat trout and the impacts, a pre-logging baseline study that was eventually to study the impact of three different kinds of logging. So, basically, what we did was we had three small streams, and we took population estimates and did food studies on cutthroat trout over a two year period, and then some years after I left, Georgia-Pacific came in and did clear cut and two other different kinds of logging, and the effects of that were studied over a period of many, many years under Major Professor, Don Chapman, and later Jim Hall, and the results were eventually published that were used in the west coast as guidance for environmental regulations to minimize the impact of logging. When I finished there, and I got a Masters degree in Fisheries Research in March of 1964, I was selected for a fisheries research job in Wisconsin Conservation Department, now their Department of Natural Resources at Seven Springs Hatchery near Madison, Wisconsin.
We went there and I worked on warm water fish research at Cox Hollow Impoundment west of Madison, and did that for several months; well actually, we lived in a couple of different places there, so it probably would be more like a year or so. Then I got more interested in trout research, so it shifted from warm water research to trout research, and transferred to Westfield, to Lawrence Creek Research Station, and which was a long-term study of brook trout production and life history and the impacts of different kinds of stream improvement techniques. While I was there, I got acquainted with the people at Stevens Point at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, and they offered me a job teaching biology. At the same time, I also applied for a job with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service for a field biologist in northern Wisconsin. I did teach for a part of a semester at Stevens Point, but got an opportunity to take the field biologist job for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. So, beginning in about the very late fall of 1965, I started working for the Federal Government as a field biologist for northern Wisconsin.
My territory was basically north of a line from Eau Claire to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and traveled with a canoe on top of a government car, and did a lot work with landowners, fish ponds, developing plans for the enhancement of deer, grouse, and other wildlife on private lands in that area. One of the most interesting things that I did during that period of time was, because while in the Soil Conservation Service, there were only two biologists in the state of Wisconsin, and some of the activities of a biologist went over into the area of recreation specialist, and I gradually became a recreation specialist and designing campgrounds. I designed a campground at Washburn, Wisconsin on Lake Superior for example, and some others ones, and did analysis of recreational potential and also some economic analysis of whether things were feasible or not. But probably the most fun thing that I did during that period of time was to get involved in writing canoe trail guides for Wisconsin. I wrote the canoe trail guides for northwest Wisconsin and north central Wisconsin, and also northeastern Wisconsin. The northwest and north central ones were published by independent canoe trail organizations. These were all done under the Food and Agricultural Act of 1964, which authorized something called Research Conservation and Development Projects; under the auspices of those programs, the work was done by the Soil Conservation Service, taking air photos and making maps of the rivers, and then I would write the narratives. In the course of doing that, it became necessary, of course, to travel many of the rivers with a canoe so that I had some first- hand knowledge. But the one for northeastern Wisconsin, the canoe trail organization that was there decided to cut a deal with Howard Mead of Wisconsin Tales and Trails, and so that one was published as a for profit venture by Wisconsin Tales and Trails. I found it amusing in an example of human nature that when Howard Mead got ahold of a narrative, he went through it and edited lightly and then put himself down as the author, which, as a philosopher says, "You know, these are humans, we shouldn't expect too much." This applies to a lot of things.
But anyway, after that I became more interested in management and, of course, we were having children at the time and, as often is the case, people who work for organizations, both private and public, once they get to be thirty and realize that there is something called money and consequences that flow from it and have children, we decided that it might be a good idea to have a higher paying job, so I got involved in management of the Resource Conservation and Development Project as project coordinator and did that for a couple of years, and a couple of years later was selected by the Soil Conservation Service for their Executive Development Program at one of six universities, and I was sent to Syracuse University for a year to get a Masters degree in Public Administration. It was a delightful year, both I and Sandy went to school at that time, we had four kids, we lived in student housing, we saw no one from our agency for a year, they paid our full salary and all of the costs of going to school as well as relocation allowances. It was just a wonderful time, and we enjoyed Syracuse. However, it was sort of like The Devil and Daniel Webster; at the end of that time they informed me we were going to go to Washington. We weren't real happy about it because we had been living in Spooner, Wisconsin. I always like to think it was like looking through the telescope from one end and then somebody grabbing it and turning it around and saying, "Here, look through the other end for awhile," because it was a completely different situation, and we weren't really thrilled about it, but naturally we went there because in order to go to school, I had to sign an agreement that I would work anywhere that they wanted me to for at least two years.
So, we went down there, and as it turned out, it was really a most interesting and enjoyable assignment except for the commuting. Like a lot of families with children, we lived out in Fairfax, Virginia in a place called Greenbrier, but it was about an hour and fifteen minutes commute to work, and it was always very heavy traffic and the last ten miles was pretty much bumper to bumper, so the commuting was no fun. But, I really did find that the best and brightest people in the agency with at that time, the Soil Conservation Service, now called the Natural Resource Conservation Service, had a lot of very bright and interesting people in Washington. When I got there it was in 1975. I was there for a little over two years, and it was at the height of the environmental movement, so it was a fun time for an environmentalist and conservationist to be there because you had the opportunity to write regulations and speeches for people that could actually influence the environmental activities of the agency and, to some extent, the public and politicians nationwide. So, it was a fun period of time. At the end of the two years I decided that I really kind of wanted to get out of Washington, so I applied for a job as the Midwest Regional Biologist at Lincoln, Nebraska for the Soil Conservation Service. I was selected for it, and in late 1977 we moved to Lincoln, Nebraska and I assumed my duties at the regional office as Midwest Regional Biologist.
I found that the job for the regional offices, quite frankly, in Soil Conservation Service by that time was becoming a little bit redundant. I felt like it was a fun job, a great place to live and, in fact, the people in Nebraska were the most friendly people we have ever encountered, but I found the job just kind of boring. Also, at that time we had moved over twenty times and, of course, with school and jobs and everything. So Sandy and I decided we would really like to get somewhere and stay, and I would have had to have had probably three more transfers in the Soil Conservation Service before I could have got a conservations job and stay in one place, and it wouldn't necessarily have been where I wanted to be, and I wanted to be in Minneapolis, and I wanted the kids not to have to move, the oldest one was going to be a junior in high school. So we started applying for jobs with Fish and Wildlife Service in Minneapolis. I finally got selected for one, I had to take a two grade cut to get there, but I was sick of transferring and I wanted the kids to be in one spot.
That is how we came to the Fish and Wildlife Service in Minneapolis, as an environmental specialist for the Refuge System at the regional office in Minneapolis. That was in 1978, and within a couple of years, I enjoyed that job, but within a couple of years, Ray St. Ores, who was the Assistant Regional Director for Environment, that wasn't the name at that time, retired. I applied for his job; I was encouraged to apply for it by other people at the regional office, and was selected for it, and that was the job that I spent for the next ten years, even though its name got changed and the function got changed to some degree, and so I was the Assistant Regional Director for, what ended up when I retired, the ARD for Environment, Regional Office, Minneapolis. I retired in 1990, at the age of 55. That basically was the moment I became eligible!
My general philosophy about jobs is that it's nice if you could be at a job for three years. The first year, if it's a challenging job, you're kind of bewildered, the second year you get it down pat, and the third year you make some contributions. After that, it tends to become kind of pro forma and not too exciting. I considered the ten years that I spent at that job as a fun job with a lot of interesting people, but not very exciting. So when it became possible for me to retire at 55, I accepted the opportunity and left the Fish and Wildlife Service.
In the meantime, we were living in Hudson, Wisconsin, which is just across the river, and in the meantime, well beginning actually in Nebraska, my wife Sandy had gotten a real estate license in Nebraska, but before she had a chance to do much with it, we moved to Wisconsin and I began working at Fish and Wildlife Service. She then started working as a real estate broker, first a small company and then Century 21, and then after about six years or so of that, she decided that she wanted to work by herself, and formed Lowery Real Estate in Hudson, Wisconsin starting in 1988. When I retired from Fish and Wildlife Service in 1990, I had previously gotten a brokers license so that she and I could talk about the business she was in too, she wasn't ready to retire, and so I worked with her and basically helped her in the management and the business execution side of the real estate business until about 1997. At which time we sold our property, and at that time I had been seven years into retirement, and we sold our property in Hudson and moved to a lake cabin on Loon Lake, about forty miles north of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We had built the cabin by hand, starting in about 1985; it was sort of a weekend hobby where we would kind of de-stress ourselves from our jobs. We would come down and put up a row of logs, and slowly, over a period of a couple of years, we built the cabin, and it has now become our home. So, I guess at this point I'll ask, "Dorothe, what else are you interested in?
D. Norton:
Well, you didn't need any training when you came to us because you already had all of this other experience, but did you ever work with any animals or anything?
Gerry Lowry:
When you say animals, you mean...?
D. Norton:
Any of them, wildcats....?
Gerry Lowry:
No, basically my degree at the University of Minnesota was in fisheries, well it was Fish and Wildlife Management is the degree that you get from University of Minnesota. It's necessarily kind of general, but it had an emphasis in fisheries and the Masters degree at Oregon was Fisheries Research. When I worked as a field biologist for the Soil Conservation Service, we worked with fish and wildlife for private landowners in northern Wisconsin, but when you do that you're developing management plans, it's not hands on work with live animals or research with them. The only actual work with animals I did was the research work at Oregon State University with fish, and then later with fish research and trout research, and warm water fish with the State of Wisconsin, where you're actually netting fish, tagging them, weighing them, releasing them, recapturing them, and estimating them. The emphasis in my career was in fisheries in terms of working with animals hands on.
D. Norton:
Were there any major issues that you were involved with that you had to deal with, or were they all major issues?
Gerry Lowry:
Well, that's an interesting question. I guess I don't think of it that way. You know, you go to work, you do your job, and whatever comes, you do the best you can, whether it's major or minor.
D. Norton:
Okay.
Gerry Lowry:
I would say nothing really stands out.
D. Norton:
So you spent all of your career then at the Minneapolis Regional Office?
Gerry Lowry:
In the Fish and Wildlife Service, yes.
D. Norton:
Who were your supervisors?
Gerry Lowry:
My first supervisor was... who was the gentleman that lost his son in the canoe? I forget his name, he was a real nice fellow. You probably know him.
D. Norton:
He lost his son?
Gerry Lowry:
His son died on the Cattle River I think, in a canoe accident.
D. Norton:
I can't remember, I vaguely remember.
Gerry Lowry:
He would have been...
D. Norton:
The regional director?
Gerry Lowry:
No, when first I went there I worked for Refuges, like they had technical specialists at the regional office, and (unclear) was the supervisor of this guy.
D. Norton:
Okay, okay, John Eadie?
Gerry Lowry:
No, Eadie was a later ARD.
D. Norton:
Okay, Harold {Benson}.
Gerry Lowry:
Harold was an ARD too for refuges; this was a younger guy who worked for them, next level down.
D. Norton:
I can't remember.
Gerry Lowry:
I'm sorry, I can't think of his name, but.
D. Norton:
I never worked in Refuges, so it's just.... Okay, then after he was...?
Gerry Lowry:
Well, when I got the job for ARD for Environment I think Gritman probably, no he wasn't the.... When I first got the job, there was a fellow there that was the Deputy Regional Director, and he was retiring within just a few months. As I recall, the Regional Director’s job was vacant at that time, and then Nelson got the job and came in, and then Gritman came in as Deputy. Before Gritman, there was a fellow that actually selected me for the job, who would have been the Deputy, and this would have been 1980, approximately. Gritman came from Denver as I recall.
D. Norton:
Right, because they.... Okay, but when you retired, who was your supervisor?
Gerry Lowry:
Well, let me say this. I worked for four conservation agencies, two state and two federal, and then the two federal agencies, the Soil Conservation Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service. I worked in, you could call it middle management, so I got a good exposure to the management systems in the two agencies, and it was a fascinating contrast. The Soil Conservation Service was established by a fellow named Hugh Hammond Bennett at the height of the Depression. It was established as the result of the dust bowl and pressing and obvious conservation problems, and it was established under the auspices of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who brought a bunch of very gifted, sophisticated, well-trained people in the government at that time and, as a result, the Soil Conservation Service was blessed with a very sophisticated, professional, simple management system that was basically line and staff, with a director in Washington and state directors. It was organized at the national office, six regional offices, and it was set up then along mostly state lines below that, which made it very easy for it to coordinate with states, and it had very clean and simple management structure, very sophisticated, very professional. When I came to Fish and Wildlife Service, I was somewhat chagrined and shocked to discover that this was an agency whose management system apparently had been cobbled together over long periods of time. It was a much older agency, and it had functions added and subtracted to it over the years, and it was cursed with a management system that combined line supervision with program management. In effect, always you had two supervisors, you had the people who gave you the money, the program management system, and you had the people that were your direct supervisors, and these are different people. So, you were always questioning, "Now which master should I be trying to serve most?" The one that gives you the money or the one that does your day-to-day supervision or month-to-month as it may be, and that does your performance reviews, and is going to be responsible for what you can do and can't do in the future in the agency? So, at any given moment, you might be more responsive to one, the other, neither, or both! Also, additionally, the tradition of management in the Fish and Wildlife Service is relatively unprofessional, kind of chaotic. I likened it to almost like a cowboy management atmosphere. For example, I had a deputy regional director that actually told me one time, this was relatively a young deputy regional director, and he said to me, "Here I am, the deputy regional director, and I've never had a single management training course!" This was a quotation, and this gentleman violated almost the most simplest and basic rules of management. One that always stuck in my mind was, you praise people publically and you reprimand them privately, and he would routinely... this is the smallest example of the egregious management conduct and so.... So, I found coming from the Soil Conservation Service, that had such a fortunate, and it really was largely a fortunate accident in a sense, because it was formed intact at a time with people that set up really an effective and simple and good, and had a long and professional management culture. Coming to Fish and Wildlife Service, it was a chaotic management culture, and cursed with this different system of financial and line authority. So when you asked me who my supervisor was, it brings up the interesting question, supervisor for what? Money or performance reviews? But, generally speaking, as the assistant regional director in the Fish and Wildlife Service, in theory, your supervisor is the regional director from the practical day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month standpoint. The regional directors that we had pretty much delegated the management supervision to the deputy regional director, who, for much of the time that I was ARD for Environment at Minneapolis, was a fellow named James Gritman, and then later on it was a fellow named Marvin Moriarty.
D. Norton:
James Gritman was probably the regional director when you retired?
Gerry Lowry:
Yes, um hmm.
D. Norton:
Well, we're getting kind of close here. You're doing a wonderful job, thank you. What was the high point in your career with Fish and Wildlife?
Gerry Lowry:
In conclusion, just let me say this, as long as we've done this interview, I feel like probably that I'm probably one of the relatively few service employees that worked in management, that had experience at comparable management levels in another federal agency; in my case it was Soil Conservation Service, now the Natural Resource Conservation Service, and I feel obliged, and to an extent, that it might be useful to comment on the distinct differences between these two agencies. The Soil Conservation Service was started in 1935 under the aegis of very highly educated and sophisticated people that came in with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the New Deal, and he was fortunate to bring a lot of these people into the government. As a result, the agency sprang into life fully formed with relatively few changes after that, and it had a management structure that was very efficient. There was a director at Washington, regional offices that were mainly for technical support, they were not in the line as such, and then a state director pretty much in every state; a few of the smaller states were combined. It was a very simple line and staff, both your program authority, your funding, and also your supervision was in this single line, and it developed a very strong tradition of competent, professional, sophisticated management, and also fairly early on, developed a pattern of sending perspective executive people from its ranks to half a dozen of the major management schools in the United States including Michigan, Syracuse, Harvard, Yale, and perhaps a couple more over the years. Mainly, as the years went by, drew its state directors and upper managers and Washington staff from graduates of that program. I spent twelve years in that agency, two years in the Washington office and a little over a year in the regional office, and got exposed to a lot of the management structures and how it operated. I kind of assumed when I came to Fish and Wildlife Service, without looking into it, that it would also have a very, if not exactly similar, at least a very good management culture. So I was really kind of surprised when I got to Fish and Wildlife Service and found the agency, and there's some justification for it because historically, the Fish and Wildlife Service started a long time ago and was assembled over the longer period of time; some of its functions were brought together, and somehow or other it ended up with, what I consider, a very chaotic management style. The line authority was separate from the program authority at the time that I was working with it. You got your money from one set of folks leading up to Washington, and your supervision and performance reviews and, in theory, how good of a job you're doing and where you might go next in terms of your career came from another one. In my case, management came out of the assistant director in Washington for Environment, and that person decided how much money we got. The performance and supervision was with, in theory, the regional director, but in practice it was delegated to the deputy regional director, and he was the one that did the performance reviews. As a result, at any given moment, you might be trying to please the money guy or the person that did your performance review. You might think of it as at any given moment that you might be trying most to do the best job you could for either one, the other, neither, or both. Compounding it, the people that tended to gravitate to a higher management in the Fish and Wildlife Service seemed to be a totally different kind of person; they tended to be flamboyant and given to grand gestures rather than the quiet, contemplative manager who looking a long time ahead, tended to react more to the issues in the moment. In terms of management structure, frankly, I think that the Fish and Wildlife Service would be better served if it got rid of, maybe it already has, I have been retired for almost half a career, but if it simplified its management structure so that it was simple line and staff, and that the regional offices had relatively little to say and they were mainly just technical support, and regional offices were reduced to say to a couple, one in the west that served Alaska and the western part of the U.S., one in the east that served the eastern part, and that the management authority and the money flowed directly from Washington to people, preferably organized along state lines or a few group of states if necessary. At that field level, instead of having people that were in ecological service offices and you have refuge offices and fisheries, if you had one manager that was in charge of all three of these. I realize that the service (unclear) management system there was somewhat an aborted attempt to do that, but it was never fully implemented. If anything, there is a lesson: if you're going to do something, you really do it and carry it out and not just half way because that's part and parcel of the problem. I do not want to leave this though with the idea that the Fish and Wildlife does not have a lot of good people, because it had when I worked with it. All sorts of loyal, good people doing the best they can, but the management system was, frankly, a burden in many cases, that was unnecessary and counterproductive. So, I guess, Dorothe, unless there is something else, let's go to lunch.
D. Norton:
Thank you very much. Thanks for the time, Jerry.
Gerry Lowry:
You bet. I would like to finish with a book recommendation: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, absolutely a splendid book, you simply have got to read it, everybody!
D. Norton:
Thank you.
Key Words: Fellowship in Fisheries, cutthroat trout study and the impacts of pre-logging baseline study, Major Professor, Don Chapman, Jim Hall, Masters Degree in Fisheries Research, Wisconsin Conservation Department, Department of Natural Resources, Seven Springs Hatchery near Madison, Wisconsin, Cox Hollow Impoundment, warm water research, trout research, Lawrence Creek Research Station, brook trout production, Stevens Point, University of Wisconsin, U.S. Soil Conservation Service, field biologist, recreation specialist and designing campgrounds, writing canoe trail guides for the state of Wisconsin, Food and Agricultural Act of 1964, Research Conservation and Development Projects, Howard Mead of Wisconsin Tales and Trails, Executive Development Program, Syracuse University, Masters degree in Public Administration, environmental movement, environmentalist, conservationist, Midwest Regional Biologist at Lincoln, Nebraska, environmental specialist for the Refuge System at the regional office in Minneapolis, Ray St. Ores, Assistant Regional Director for Environment, ARD for Environment, Regional Office, Minneapolis, Fish and Wildlife Management degree, University of Minnesota, John Eadie, James Gritman, Hugh Hammond Bennett, Marvin Moriarty,